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Book Reviews FORUM Volume 52, Number 3, 2010 www.wwwords.co.uk/FORUM Book Reviews The Pendulum Swings: transforming school reform BERNARD BARKER, 2010 Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books 220 pages, £18.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-85856-468-5 This is a provocative and challenging book by a teacher and educationist whose work I have always much admired. I was inspired by the concept of a ‘common education’ that he articulated in his 1986 book Rescuing the Comprehensive Experience, and I was glad that he went on to develop his views on the aims of a ‘comprehensive’ education in a chapter he wrote for the first Bedford Way Paper I ever edited for the Institute of Education, Redefining the Comprehensive Experience, published a year later. In this new book, he uses a fascinating combination of statistical data, detailed case-studies and personal anecdotes to mount a devastating critique of government education policy since 1988 and to make the case for a set of imaginative ideas for transforming school reform. All this makes for exciting reading; but I find that I part company with Bernard Barker on two issues: the first concerns his views on the limited role that schools can play in effecting social change and enhancing life-chances; and the second relates to his somewhat optimistic contention that we are about to see a rejection of the dehumanising ideas that have dominated education policy- making for at least the last 30 years. The central thesis of the book is that the following five illusory beliefs have underpinned both Conservative and New Labour school reform policies since 1988: 1. Effective and efficient schools overcome disadvantage and improve life chances. 2. Markets and competition improve school efficiency and outcomes. 3. Central regulation and inspection ensure high standards of quality and performance. 4. Successful leaders transform their schools and change the system. 5. Best practice in teaching and organisation can be transferred from one site to another so that every school performs at a high level. Professor Barker discusses these ‘illusory beliefs’ in Chapter One and then reviews each of them critically in Chapters Two to Six. 405 Book Reviews The author is determined to make a strong case for rejecting each of these propositions, and his arguments are forceful and well-documented; but I have to say that I find his treatment of the first one less than convincing. I can understand the need to reject many of the simplistic criteria by which ‘successful’ schools are often judged, but I think we need to be careful about how far we go down the road of dismissing the ‘effective schools’ movement. Bernard Barker and I share a profound admiration for the work of Brian Simon; and, in my case, it was while I was one of Brian’s PGCE students at the University of Leicester in 1965/66 that I came to appreciate what the comprehensive reform was all about. One of the guiding principles that underpinned Brian’s work was that a comprehensive school that respected each child’s right to be educated could overcome ‘social disadvantage’, enhance the life-chances of hitherto deprived working-class children and ultimately transform society. Brian would have totally rejected Professor Diane Reay’s contention, quoted with approval in this book (page 5) that ‘the biggest influence on educational achievement’ has to be ‘family background’. It is now fashionable to cite with approval Basil Bernstein’s absurd and highly ambiguous maxim, that ‘education cannot compensate for society’ – the title of an article that he contributed to New Society in February 1970. This can be viewed only as a crude form of ‘social determinism’ which breeds a dire fatalism and acts as a sort of ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’. If teachers can be persuaded that they cannot bring about human development or social change through schooling, then presumably they will simply give up trying. In his ground-breaking 1971 book Intelligence, Psychology and Education, Brian argued that to say that a child was the ‘victim’ of its social background was as dangerous as saying that it was the ‘victim’ of a fixed IQ – if you abandon heredity for family circumstances or environment, you merely switch from the round-about to the swings, without giving any evidence of an intention to leave the fairground’ (p. 22). Another key principle that underpinned Brian’s work – and has remained one of FORUM’s abiding concerns – was a belief in the concept of human educability, and this is a concept that, somewhat surprisingly, receives no treatment as such in Bernard Barker’s book. If the pendulum is to swing in the right direction, surely it has to swing away from an obsession with all forms of crude ability labelling. Yet at one point, the author talks about Alan North (the pseudonym for a working-class lad who become Vice-Chancellor of a large and distinguished university in the 1990s), as ‘an exceptionally gifted working-class student’ – a description that seems to me to send out all the wrong messages about the way we regard human beings. In a couple of articles written for FORUM in 1982, Caroline Benn set out to challenge what she called ‘the myth of giftedness’ and argued that once we have accepted the argument that the search for ‘giftedness’ is limited to the hunt for a few, we ‘give up our commitment to looking for gifts, talents and abilities in the vast majority of children’. Comprehensive education is all about developing and nurturing the unique talents and abilities that each child 406 BOOK REVIEWS possesses and in the process promoting the kind of learning that is free from the needless constraints imposed by ability-focused practices. It is really quite extraordinary that a White Paper of October 2005 should contain the statement that children can be divided into three main categories: ‘the gifted and talented, the struggling and the just average’. Francis Galton! Thou shouldst be living at this hour. Chapter Seven of this book is a beautiful piece of writing which discusses ‘progressive’ alternatives to the ‘elaborate top-down architecture of market- based reform’ established since 1988. Bernard Barker argues that the leaders of the early 1960s comprehensive schools, especially, those with ‘a background in progressive education’, understood the harmful consequences of competitive individualism, and particularly for the less successful members of our society. And he pays tribute to the early pioneers of comprehensive schooling, such as Caroline Benn and Brian Simon who, in his words, were ‘deeply committed to social justice and working-class education, and believed that everyone could learn and succeed, whatever their social origins and disadvantages’ (p. 127) – a tribute which would appear to be at variance with pessimistic comments elsewhere in the book about education’s potential. The author argues persuasively that the community college, with its ‘organic conception of people living and learning together’, can be seen as a direct challenge to the ideology of education markets, where ‘citizens’ are nothing more than ‘consumers’. And he makes use of a 2007 article by Michael Fielding where Michael insists that schools should be ‘a source of optimism and energy in their communities’ and where he emphasises the democratic, obligation to provide ‘an affirmation of possibility’. This is all very positive and life-affirming. Yet Bernard returns at the end of the book to what I regard as a very negative view of what today’s schools can achieve. Having pointed out on page 171 that ‘education is intrinsically valuable’, and that ‘peoples’ lives can be transformed through shared activities and experiences’, he reiterates that ‘schools tend to reproduce and transmit social and cultural characteristics’. One of his concluding recommendations is that we should ‘cease to expect student outcomes that are very different from the social composition of a school intake’ – which seems to me to be profoundly defeatist. Finally, Bernard seems to think that we have reached the point where we can be optimistic about the future; and, as evidence of his claim that ‘the pendulum is swinging’, he quotes from one of Michael Gove’s 2009 speeches in which the Shadow Education Secretary declared his support for the cause of ‘greater school autonomy’ and wanted us to believe that school freedoms were ‘central to Conservative education plans’. This is, of course, sheer hypocrisy; and Gove’s attempt to destroy the powers of the local authorities goes along with a determination to see that all schools are organised along lines of which Conservative politicians would heartily approve. Clyde Chitty 407 Book Reviews Susan Isaacs: a life freeing the minds of children PHILIP GRAHAM, 2009 London: Karnac Books 500 pages, £29.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-185575-691-5 Philip Graham’s preface begins at the very end, with the obituaries. The London Times (13 October, 1948) announced: …her teaching has probably influenced educational theory and practice in this country more than that of any living person. Her contribution to psycho-analytical theory ... has also been notable. The obituary in Nature drew attention to ‘her exceptional capacity for instantly translating her thoughts and impressions into verbal expression.’ A seven-page obituary in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis by a leading psychoanalyst details her ‘supreme contribution to her times’ by acting as a bridge between the two professions of psychoanalysis and education, ‘interpreting the one to the other’. And yet, claims Graham, when asked whose biography he was writing, ‘the name usually elicits polite disbelief that anyone could write about someone so obscure’ (p. x). So Graham himself casts this biography as a mission to rescue Isaacs from obscurity, as a re-consideration of her achievements, and as a re-evaluation of her historical significance in the two fields of education and psychoanalysis, a significance ‘which can hardly be exaggerated’ (p.
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